Category: Other Books

I recently read “Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success” by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“It takes a number of critical factors to win an NBA championship, including the right mix of talent, creativity, intelligence, toughness, and of course, luck. But if a team doesn’t have the most essential ingredient – love – none of those other factors matter.” (4)

“I discovered the more I spoke from the heart, the more the players could hear me and benefit from what I’d gleaned.” (12)

“I discovered that the more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became. I learned to dial back my ego and distribute power as widely as possible without surrendering final authority.” (12)

“If your primary objective is to bring the team into a state of harmony and oneness, it doesn’t make sense for you to rigidly impose your authority.” (13)

“You can’t force your will on people. If you want them to act differently, you need to inspire them to change themselves.” (13)

“When I had the players sit in silence, breathing together in sync, it helped align them on a nonverbal level far more effectively than words. One breath equal one mind.” (18)

“When the mind is allowed to relax, inspiration often follows.” (22)

“Satchel Paige said, “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.”” (23)

“The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome.” (23)

“I often reminded the players to focus on the journey rather than the endgame, because if you give the future all your attention, the present will pass you by.” (91)

“When I let him solve the problem himself, he was more likely to buy into the solution and not repeat the same counterproductive behavior in the future.” (96)

“At its heart, mindfulness is about being present in the moment as much as possible, not weighed down by thoughts of the past or the future.” (99)

“The mast nodded. “To hear the unheard,” he said “is necessary discipline to be a good ruler. For only when a ruler has learned to listen closely to the people’s hearts, hearing their feelings uncommunicated, pains unexpressed, and complaints not spoken of, can he hope to inspire confidence in the people, understand when something is wrong, and meet the true needs of his citizens.” (101)

“The most effective way to deal with anxiety, I’ve discovered, is to make sure that you’re as prepared as possible for whatever is coming your way.” (102)

“John Wood used to say that, “winning takes talent, to repeat takes character.” (110)

“John Heider stresses the importance of interfering as little as possible. “Rules reduce freedom and responsibility,” he writes. “Enforcement of rules is coercive and manipulative, which diminishes spontaneity and absorbs group energy. The more coercive you are, the more resistant the group will become.” (121)

“Mindfulness is remembering to come back to the present moment.” (137)

“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.” – Steve Jobs (149)

“Instead of expecting them to be somewhere else and getting angry and trying to will them to that place, you try to meet them where they are and lead them where you want them to go.” (156)

“Everything is in flux. Until you accept this, you won’t be able to find true equanimity.” (168)

“There’s nothing like a humiliating loss to focus the mind.” (300)

“I tried to convey to him that the best way to get off the emotional roller coaster is to take the middle way and not get too high when you win or too low when your game fails you.” (303)

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I recently read “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human” by Jonathan Gottschall. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“In one study, they found that heavy fiction readers had better social skills – as measured by tests of social and empathic ability – than those who mainly read nonfiction.” (66)

“Fiction is a powerful and ancient virtual reality technology that simulates the big dilemmas of human life.” (67)

“The left brain is a relentless explainer, and it would rather fabricate a story than leave something unexplained.” (99)

“In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.” (103)

“The world’s priests and shamans knew what psychology would later confirm: if you want a message to burrow into a human mind, work it into a story.” (118)

“Throughout most of our history, we’re taught myths. The myths tell us that not only are we the good guys, but we are the smartest, boldest, best guys that ever were.” (125)

“We won’t go along [with a story] if someone tries to tell us that bad is good, and good is bad.” (129)

“Storytellers never ask us to approve. Morally repellent acts are a great staple of fiction, but so is the storyteller’s condemnation.” (130)

“It’s worth remembering that until recently, storytellers who attacked group values faced real risks. For tens of thousands of years before the invention of the book, story was an exclusively oral medium.” (133)

“In Appel’s study, people who mainly watched drama and comedy on TV – as opposed to heavy viewers of news programs and documentaries – had substantially stronger “just-world” beliefs.” (136)

“Appel concludes that fiction, by constantly marinating our brains in the theme of poetic justice, may be partly responsible for the overly optimistic sense that the world is, on the whole, a just place. And yet the fact that we take this lesson to heart may be an important part of what makes human societies work.” (136)

“IF the movie is good, the people will respond to it like a single organism. They will flinch together, gasp together, roar with laughter together, choke up together. A film takes a motley association of strangers and syncs them up. It choreographs how they feel and what they think, how fast their hearts beat, how hard they breathe, and how much they perspire. A film melds minds. It imposes emotional and psychic unity. Until the light come up and the credits roll, a film makes people one.” (136)

“Until the past few centuries, story was always an intensely communal activity.” (136)

“Tolstoy believed that an artist’s job is to “infect” his audience with his own ideas and emotions – “the stronger the infection, the better is the art as art.” (149)

“In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence.” (150)

“We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard.” (152)

“Researchers found that memory was much less trustworthy than anyone had previously suspected.” (167)

“The past, like the future, does not really exist. They are both fantasies created in our minds. The future is a probabilistic simulation we run in our heads in order to help shape the world we want to live in. The past, unlike the future, has actually happened. But the past, as represented in our minds, is a mental simulation, too. Our memories are not precise records of what actually happened. They are reconstructions of what happened, and many of the details – small and large – are unreliable.” (169)

“We misremember the past in a way that allows us to maintain protagonist status in the stories of our own lives.” (170)

“William Hirstein writes, ‘The truth is depressing. We are going to die, most likely after illness; all our friends will likewise die; we are tiny insignificant dots on a tiny planet. Perhaps with the advent of broad intelligence and foresight comes the need for… self-deception to keep depression and its consequent lethargy at bay.” (175)

“Novelists who target highbrow readers shouldn’t complain when those are the only readers they get.” (179)

Liked the quotes? Buy the book here.

I recently read “Empire State of Mind: How Jay-Z Went From The Street Corner To Corner Office” by Zack O’Malley Greenburg. The quotes I found most interesting are below. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Remembers Jaz-O, ‘I taught him that in order to be the best, you don’t have to outwardly hone your craft. But in privacy, hone your craft. People don’t have to know how hard you work to get something.’” (15)

“The decision was part of a business philosophy that can be boiled down to a very simple rule: focus on whatever venture offers the most realistic opportunity to make the most money.” (28)

“If you did it in the streets, and you did your business properly in the streets, and you made good money in the streets, when you walk into a boardroom you look at everybody in the boardroom like they’re suckers,” Kent explains.

“Dash’s guiding principle: “We shouldn’t let other people make money off us, and we shouldn’t give free advertising with our lifestyle.” (45)

“Dash wasn’t saying that Jay-Z and other Roc-A-Fella artists should stop rapping about designer clothes and high-end liquor; rather, that they should be compensated for the endorsements – or create their own brands.” (45)

“Where other rappers might have been cast as sellouts, Jay-Z was able to maintain a high level of credibility because of his relationship with the highly respected Biggie.” (56)

“Fueled by the feud, Jay-Z’s music was selling faster than ever; his new album achieved platinum status barely a month after its release. “What really became interesting about that battle is how Jay used it to create more popularity for his music and less popularity for the battle, and I think it was a very smart business move on Jay’s part,” says Serch.” (60)

“Chang believes Jay-Z engineered the clash to keep himself relevant on the street and to satisfy the hardcore fanbase that he risked alienating with some of the more poppy songs he’d been putting out around that time.” (61)

“This was a period that would be characterized not by spats, coastal or local, but by placing himself, both lyrically and physically, in the presence of people associated with victory.” (62)

Did you like the quotes? Then buy the book here.

I recently read “Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends On It.” by  Mitch Joel. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Always remember this: Make it about your customers’ needs. A great utility is something that adds tremendous value to individuals’ lives – and in doing so, makes them more naturally aligned with your brand. It’s not about you… it’s about them.” (40)

“Create it, give it out, and spread it with no expectations.” (41)

“The ultimate questions – as defined by Reichheld – is this: “How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” (42)

“True utility happens in the moment of need. Not the brand’s moment of need, but the consumer’s moment of need. If you can meet that need when the customer needs it met, you are on to something big.” (42)

“Look at the raw data: Most people are not all that happy. The majority of folks in the Western world work hard all day at a job they don’t love, so when they come home they just want to sit down, relax, sip a beer, and let the television wash over them. They don’t want to think about the day they just had, and they definitely don’t want to think about the day that is coming tomorrow.” (48)

“Media has anesthetized us to reality for decades.” (48)

“Mobile is not a smaller version of a website. You need to think of mobile with a completely different approach.” (104)

“At that moment, I realized that the iPhone was a better companion than a human being.” (114)

“A digital-first posture means that the first place your consumers go when making a business decision is to their computers, smartphones, and/or tablets. This should be your default posture as well.” (124)

“Mark Goodman used to have a sign hanging in his office that read: BE BRILLIANT, BE BRIEF, BE GONE.” (152)

“It’s not going to happen if you wait for the boss to tell you to make it happen.” (159)

“Most entrepreneurs eventually become business owners. They stop worrying about how to create the future and start worrying about how to grow their current revenue baseline – they strategize about how to maintain the status quo.” (162)

“Business owners think a lot less about creating the future because they are much too concerned with both mitigating risk and minimizing mistakes.” (162)

“We would like to think that we can have it all, but it turns out that the real superstars in our world are working themselves to the bone.” (166)

“There is a world of difference between stress that comes from the things you want to do and the stress that comes when you feel like you’re not working on the stuff that matters most to you.” (167)

“The most adaptive path for you to find your success in these times of purgatory will be in your ability to forget about the notion of work/life balance and find the blend in your work, personal, and community life.” (168)

“People who make themselves indispensable are indispensable – whether it’s a time of mass economic health or whether the economy is a mess.” (169)

“You are not the same person when you’re on Facebook as your are when you’re on Google.” (181)

“It’s not that great ideas got killed by clients… it’s that agencies killed their own great ideas by not presenting them well.” (184)

“Life’s a pitch. Deal with it.” (185)

“The problem is that businesses are constantly looking to game the system, to cheat, to take the humanness out of it. Don’t automate your sincerity and your connections.” (186)

“Worry less about how many people you are connected to, and worry a whole lot more about who you are connected to – who they are and what you are doing to value and honor them.” (193)

“Stop thinking about content as the endgame and consider that the true value is the stories you tell.” (195)

“It’s all about great stories. It’s a tall order, but if you’re looking to create a true mark and to get people to remark about everything that you’re doing, you only have one major mission when it comes to marketing yourself and the business that you represent: Go out there and create some great stories.” (196)

“People like sharing things that not only sound cool, but make them look smart.” (226)

“Here’s the truth: You won’t find your voice over time. I don’t believe that writers arrive at this strange destination called “their voice.” I think a strong voice evolves over time. But none of that happens without writing. You’re not writing for writing’s sake. You’re writing to exercise your critical thinking skills. When you do that often enough, great writing will start to flow.” (227)

“Google, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. know that the simpler and faster they make their products, the less likelihood there will be for consumers to go elsewhere.” (247)

“The business world of the future is a place where brands publish less but optimize more for speed and efficiency.” (247)

Liked the quotes? Please buy the book.